


always homesick for the trees you’ve never seen

by kiira



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 09:32:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3687192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/kiira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the two girls trapped, below earth, below ground because (nothing sings more sweetly than a caged bird)</p>
            </blockquote>





	always homesick for the trees you’ve never seen

1.

You learn what the sun is for the first time when you’re seven years old. The world, for you, is ceilings and walls and buzzing buzzing lights (corridors and flags and Do Not Pass This Point).

It’s in a textbook, one that’s for the older kids and you devour it quickly; hearts and genes and DNA and then plants and sun and something  _photosynthesis_  (the putting together of light and your mind flashes to the cold, gray lights above; what do they have to do with growth, with newness?)

You ask your mother and she gives you a quiet smile and a “I’ll tell you when you’re older, Maya” (she’s gonna tell you a lot of things when you’re older: why Mr and Mrs Valentine across the hall never get sick and why you can’t Go Past This Point and why the kids in your books all have dogs in their houses).

Why she’s slowly fading away.

(She dies thirty-two days later and you forget what the sun looks like).

/

Bellamy tells you everything you know about the world (the world is four walls, a ceiling, four walls, a ceiling, four walls, four walls four walls and darkness). He’s the one who knocks on the ceiling of your Cage when it’s safe to come out, the one who brings you books to read, the one who describes in careful details exactly what the stars look like.

You imagine them to look like the light filtering through the cracks at the edge of the Pit, like something you can never quite reach.

(You don’t tell this to Bellamy, not ever. He gets a twisted look when you mention Prison and he’s your only friend.)

Sometimes when it’s late enough or dark enough in the rest of the world you can flick on the tiny flashlight Bell bought from some mechanic wannabe, read the books he brings you because there’s nothing else to  _do_  (and if you read enough, hope enough, pray enough maybe you’ll wake up somewhere other than This).

2.

You are thirteen and sometimes you forget what your mother whispered to you at night that: there is something wrong here, Maya, we are doing something wrong.

You are thirteen, and you break your wrist in gym class at school trying to do a cartwheel. Ms Koster holds your unshattered hand and carefully leads you to the medical center: it is gray and open and there are smiling people in green scrubs and tubes snaking into the wall.

The smiling woman asks you your name and you don’t cry when you answer even though your wrist  _hurts_  and your mother’s voice echoes in your head.

She sets your wrist quickly and the tubes coming out of the wall pulse with something. A woman lying on a bed has one hooked into her arm; you watch as something hot, fast,  _red_  drips into her (blood, you think, it’s blood).

“Thank you,” you whisper to the woman, cradle your arm close to your chest.

She nods once and the tubes glisten.

/

Once you were locked in Hell for seventeen days straight; Bellamy opened the gates in the early hours of the morning to sneak water (food) to you but: it wasn’t every day.

“Where’s  _mom_?,” you whisper once and he looks away, scared.

You read your twenty-three books thirteen times: count the number of words on each page, write new ending in your head (endings where the bird-girls, the Octavia-girls can fly free), you don’t sleep (can’t sleep), can feel Scared slick in your lungs.

 _I am going to die here_ , you think on the sixteenth day,  _I am going to die and no one will ever know._

You want to scream, want to kick the ceiling-floor but you curl your nails into your palms and bit your tongue.

3.

It’s a Friday when you see the outside for the first time. It’s completely illegal, completely because your friend Leila has an internship with the security team and she lets you sit in the dark room with her and work on your Calc homework.

But: “You wanna see something?”

She glances over her shoulder at the door, at the guard standing outside.

You nod, Calc forgotten behind an old monitor.

“You can’t tell anyone, ‘kay? This is like … I’m not supposed to do this,” and she quickly punches about half the buttons in front of her, and all the screens go black.

“Lelia…” you whisper, anxiety creeping into your voice and she rolls her eyes.

“Seriously, chill Maya. You’re never gonna do anything if you follow all the rules,” and sometimes Lelia talks like the kids in the old movies that they play every so often.

She types in something that looks suspiciously like a password (you do not want to know what she’s doing) and then. And then.

The sky is more blue than you would have ever imagined. And it’s  _bright_ , soft, harsh, everything the mountain isn’t. Lelia twists the camera around, points it at a huge door, metal and concrete and: this is you.

Trapped: metal, concrete and the sky is so  _blue_.

Something inside you aches, something inside you burns because thousands of tons of rock and dirt and radiation keep you locked here.

And the sky is wonderfully, wonderfully blue.

/

Someone walks into the room above your head, and they fumble with the latch to the Coffin. Every time someone opens it, you feel your lungs stop working, because what if this time it’s someone coming to take you away?

But it’s just Bellamy and he’s smiling like that time he found the extra rations tickets in a library book. He has a piece of paper clutched in his fist and he grabs your arm and pulls you out of the ground.

“So,” he starts, talking quickly, like he can’t quite talk fast enough for his mind to keep up, “so I know this kid Laura who’s friends with Grace who does  _something_  related to the council, paperwork or something, and she know Wells, Wells  _Jaha_ , who’s best friends with some girl named Clarke or Lark or something and she’s,” and he unfurls the paper, “some kind of fantastic artist.”

It’s a drawing, done in pencil and on the back of what looks like math or science or something you never got to learn, and it’s  _beautiful_. Bell points to it and whispers, completely unnecessarily, “That’s the Earth,” and you reach for the drawing with shaking hands.

 _Stars_ , you remember and  _Earth_  and the Ark and Bellamy beams at you.

“You like?”

(You learn later that he traded a whole week’s food rations for the drawing.)

“I love it,” and you hug him tight.

You pin the drawing to the roof of your Prison, when you close your eyes most of the way, you can pretend it’s all real.

4.

Octavia grins, feral and sharp at you and she has dirt smeared on her cheeks, sunshine dripping in her hair.

She looks (trapped).

/

Maya dies as you watch, helpless.

She dies as she lived (trapped).  

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @ bettymcraae.tumblr.com so come hang out there if u want i guess


End file.
